BRICS stitches climate into its trade and growth agenda, experts say

Buried inside the 45-page New Delhi Declaration is a wager: that climate resilience sells better to a fractious bloc of eleven nations when it's framed as economics rather than environmentalism.

That reading came up again and again as analysts picked through the document this week. "What is interesting about the declaration, apart from its inordinate length, is that it is profoundly multilateral," said Rathin Roy, an economic advisor and dean at GITAM School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

He pointed out that wherever climate change appears in the text, the word "including" tends to come first.

"So this is sustainable development, including climate. They are weaving in a broader lens." Roy also noted something missing entirely: the phrase "net zero," a staple of European climate diplomacy, doesn't appear once. "The framing is profoundly different from the way the Europeans framed the climate change problem," he said.

The declaration takes a direct shot at the EU's carbon border tax, calling such measures "unilateral, punitive, discriminatory and protectionist." Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, called this a deliberate stance.

"BRICS is determined to chart its own course on climate and energy, one that emphasizes the alignment of development and decarbonization rather than treating them as competing priorities," he said, adding that the bloc's insistence on keeping fossil fuels in the mix for developing economies "signals that these leading Global South countries intend to define the terms of their own energy transition."

Ambassador Manjeev Puri of The Energy and Resources Institute framed the summit itself as an act of endurance. "It is important that all these nations, who may have political disagreements, have stood together in unity on the critical issues of development and sustainability," he said, citing shared pushback against unilateralism and renewed work on cross-border payments and supply chains.

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Disaster preparedness got specific attention. Ulka Kelkar of WRI India welcomed new voluntary principles requiring climate risk to be built into land-use planning, along with a proposed BRICS Insurance Resilience Centre. "This would be crucial to prevent maladaptation," she said, adding that BRICS nations are increasingly climate finance donors, not just recipients.

On energy manufacturing, Subrahmanyam Pulipaka, CEO of the National Solar Energy Federation of India, pointed to scale: BRICS nations already hold more than half the world's installed renewable capacity, he said, and a proposed Solar Photovoltaic Cooperation Roadmap "provides an important opportunity to translate this scale into deeper industrial cooperation."

Climate researcher Archana Chaudhary summed up the shift: "It does not treat climate resilience as a standalone environmental issue. It places it inside a wider argument about economic resilience, industrial capacity, trade, finance and national policy space."

Whether that argument survives contact with rising debt burdens and diverging national interests, analysts said, is next year's question.